Recipes on the back of packets #1

Next time you go to the supermarket to do a bit of shopping, have a look at the back of every packet you are buying. A lot of ingredients packets have recipes on them. Does anybody use these recipes? Are the recipes actually any good? I have a bit of a theory that they probably aren't very good at all. So I'm going to test a few as I come across them to see if they're any good.

#1. Choc Chip Cookies from the back of the Nestle Choc Bits Packet.
225g butter, softened
1/2 cup of castor sugar
1/4 cup Sweetened Condensed Milk (I used the Nestle 99% Fat-Free version)
2 cups Plain Flour
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup Choc Bits (I used Milk but Dark would be great)

Pre-heat the oven to 190C.
Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the sweetened condensed milk. Cream until the mixture is light and fluffy. (Use your Mixmaster)
Sift the flour and baking powder together and then add to the mixture, beating it together slowly. Add the choc chips (and extras if you are adding any)
The mixture will come together like a soft, buttery pastry with choc chips in it. Because that's what it is.
Roll the mixture into balls about the size of a ping-pong ball and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper or tin-foil. Flatten them a little. Leave space between each cookie as they will flatten out.

The recipe says to bake them for 15 minutes in 190C. I found this to be too long for too high. I cooked them  at 150C and set the timer for 15 mins but I kept a close eye on them. When the bases were brown, I took them out of the oven. (My oven is slightly dodgy)

RESULT: Very good! But I would recommend trying some variations in this recipe as the choc chips alone aren't that exciting. I added mini-marshmallows but some salty caramel or fudge would be great too. These cookies are as good as or better than those ones from Subway.

There is also something odd about the choc-chips. On the front of the packet there is a "benefit" that claims that the choc chips hold their shape when baked. Does that seem odd to you? I'm pretty sure I would prefer chocolate that melts when it's baked.

TIP! Salted caramel is and will always be awesome. If you don't like it, feel free to not tell me about it.

NOTE! None of the companies mentioned in this recipe have paid me, asked me to mention them or try this.

Bloody Manly egg and bacon pie

I don't know why, but somewhere along the timeline of stupid man-stuff, "quiche" got a bad name. But the joke is that if you call it "Egg & Bacon Pie" it makes it ok. Maybe it's that the word "quiche" sounds a little poncy? Maybe some dumb-arse was emasculated by the fact that he couldn't spell it? Whatever the deal is, I'm over it. It's stupid and we've moved on since the 70's, so catch the fuck up.

I love quiche. Its EASY. Its about the easiest thing you can make, give or take a cheese toastie. And I will get to cheese toasties eventually too, as I have some brilliant variations that would hair on an alopecia sufferer's chest, which is something that science should look into.

Quiche is a brilliant way to use left-over stuff in your food storage areas. You can go with tradition if you want and just make it egg and bacon and cheese. Or you can use up the rest of the good stuff you don't want to waste and make it a "gourmet" mess, which can hardly ever go wrong, sort of.

Any recipe book worth a pinch of salt will have a basic quiche recipe in it which is basically a blank recipe that you can feel free to add your leftovers to. So here is a very, very basic quiche "blank" to start with and then you can go to town with whatever muck in your fridge is a couple of days past its use-by.

Blank Quiche
4 Eggs
1 cup of milk (warmed)
Pepper
Enough pastry to cover the base of a quiche dish (frozen shortcrust is awesome, puff will work too)
Grated cheese

Whisk the eggs in a bowl with the milk and two or three grinds of pepper.

Line a fairly shallow dish with the pastry.

Now find some stuff to ensure your quiche is more than just cooked egg pie. For mine, I pan-fried some small cubes of pumpkin, then I did the same with some onion and bacon. Chuck it on top of the pastry in the dish and spread it about evenly. I added some spring onions at this point and then I poured the egg mix evenly over the lot. Then I quartered up some cherry tomatoes and spread them over the top. Then spread
some grated cheese over the top and chuck it into a preheated oven at 200C for about 15 minutes.

Remember that a quiche is basically open to putting whatever you want in it. It's receptive, so try a bunch of stuff. Mushroom is good. Roast chicken wins. Bacon rocks. Sweetcorn is awesome. Capsicum, yes. Potato, probably not. A cheeseburger, don't.

TIP: Spring onion makes any quiche more awesome, especially if you use a lot of cheese and don't have much else.

"Country Style" Pea & Ham Soup

If tinned soup has taught me anything, its that country people are too lazy to chop vegetables into small pieces. I'm OK with lazy (aka energy efficient) and chunky is good when it comes to soup. In Winter there is nothing better than coming in from the cold to the smell of a soup that has been simmering away for hours. And even better is polishing off a big bowl of steaming, chunky, hearty soup with some fresh bread and butter. My particular favourite is Pea & Ham.

Right now supermarkets are all over the hearty winter ingredients and they are cheaper than chips, which are unusually expensive given they're made of fucking potatoes and that one packet of chips contains roughly one potato which would otherwise cost you fuck-all and a pinch of chicken salt worth 2c. This soup really only has two main ingredients - a bag of Split peas will cost you $1 and Smoked Ham Hock. You can use bacon bones instead and they're about the same price per kg but they don't yield nearly as much meat, so stick with the hock. You only really need one big hock. I bought one medium sized hock for $4.38.

The split peas will have a recipe for Pea & Ham Soup on the back of the packet because Pea & Ham soup is the only recipe in the world with split peas in it except for plain Split Pea soup which even vegetarians and doomed pigs think is boring. The good news is that the packet recipe is fine. But it's better with a few amendments.

Just Three Ingredients! If you want.

For the simplest version, you can literally just use the peas, the hock and about 8 cups of water. But it can be made even more awesome with some simple extras thrown in. Instead of just water, I also like to use a little bit of stock - it adds depth. It also adds "sounding wanky" if you mention it out loud or on a blog. I also put in salt, pepper and a bay leaf. Easy. If you have a family and want to extend it or sneak some vegies into your kids, add a chopped onion and two diced carrots.

Chop It Up. Here's a photograph I prepared earlier.

Some people, including the back of the pea packet (wait, that's not people) will tell you to pre-cook the peas but this soup is best slow-simmered over a few hours so there is no way they wont be cooked anyway, so skip it. Chuck all the ingredients into a big pot over high heat on the stove until it boils. Then turn the heat down and simmer it.

It will look like a pot full of uncooked ingredients. Do not eat it yet.

Show me simmering, baby!

Simmer it for a few hours. You'll need to stir it occasionally, but just to make sure that nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pot. It will slowly but surely thicken and the meat will come away from the bone.

When the skin has come away from the meat you can take it out and give it to your dog, who will love you forever.

Some recipes say to take the meat out and cut it into cubes, put the stick blender in and give it a whiz or some will say to run the soup through a sieve or but I don't bother with any of it. If it has been cooked for long enough, the peas will have broken down and the meat will have fallen clean off the bones. It's extra work that you can just skip if you have time to leave it simmering away for longer. You will occasionally get small bits of bone in the soup but if that really bothers you, maybe you should just take a long hard look at your life. How do you think the pig feels? Toughen up.

A couple of hours later, when the soup looks like swamp filth, take out the bones and the bay leaves - it's  ready. It will be thick, it will be meaty and it will be awesome.

Put the win in Winter.

Hint! This soup gets thicker the longer you cook it. If it gets too sludgy, just add water to bring it back to a consistency you prefer. It also congeals when you put it in the fridge. The best thing to do is just to add a little water before you reheat it and it will come up a treat.

And was it cheap? My oath! The split peas were $1, the hock was $4.38, one onion was about 20c and two carrots at about 20c each means that my outlay was about $6. The rest of the ingredients came from the pantry (bay leaves, stock, S&P). This should feed a family of five well. Thrift!!

COMING UP - When life gives you lemons, make lemon curd. And then have it on pancakes.

Lamb Stew with Parsley Dumplings

I'm unemployed at the moment and I don't have much cash. So when I go to the supermarket, I only have a general plan. I tend to look for the things that are on special or that are close to their use-by dates so that they are a little cheaper. I can freeze them when I get home if I need to.
Which is what I did yesterday. I was at Woolworth's and I saw a cut of meat called "Lamb Offcuts". They were really cheap - one packet was 96 cents, another $1.45 and the most expensive one $1.95. I picked them up and knew I would make a Lamb Stew straight away. I grabbed some other basics - potatoes, carrots and took off home to bust out the Slow-Cooker.

As a general rule, I'm not a fan of food gadgets like rice cookers or popcorn machines.We've got by without them til now, haven't we? But I do have a slow cooker and I'm not averse to using it.
I wanted a big, hearty lamb stew with melt in the mouth lamb and a rich sauce. And here's how I got it.

I started by browning the lamb in a frypan. It just gives it a good colour and gets some of the fat off. Then I cut any excess fat away and put the lamb in the slow cooker . Cooking it with the bones in gives it an even heartier flavour.I added two potatoes and a carrot that I had cut into chunks as well as a tin of chopped tomatoes (I'm an advocate of fresh, but right now the tomatoes are looking a bit off and they're expensive AND I had this in the cupboard). I covered it with passata (about half a jar)and threw in some dried herbs like Rosemary and "Mixed Herbs". Then I added a teaspoon of minced garlic and a cup of chicken stock and gave it a bit of a mix around in the pot. You can muck around a little bit here with different root vegetables, herbs, that kind of thing, depending on your personal tastes. Salt and Pepper are vital though, so make sure you throw in a bit of both.


Lid on, I put it on High for about an hour. Then I gave it a stir and switched it to Low and left it overnight. When I got up this morning, it looked like this

It was pretty much ready to eat - the lamb was falling apart and the sauce was delicious and rich. But there was still something I wanted to add. I plucked out the bones and left it on Low.

I love the traditional foods that I grew up with, so I added Parsley Dumplings to the mix. This is the simplest way to make your food reach a little further - especially if you have a family. Dumplings cost next to nothing and are made with stuff you should already have in the cupboard - Milk, Butter, SR Flour, an egg and salt. And parsley, of course. I have a parsley plant in the backyard so I used that but you can use dried if that's what you have. This is my mum's recipe.

Parsley Dumplings
120grams Self Raising Flour
25 grams Butter
1 egg
125mls milk (Soy milk works just as well)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tbs chopped parsley

How To
Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.
Rub in the butter using your finger tips (HINT - If the butter is cold, melt it over a low heat first, it will rub in in no time.)
In a small bowl, beat the egg into the milk and then add the parsley.
Pour the egg milk mixture into the flour and mix (I use a long-pronged fork) into a smooth batter.
Scoop it spoonfuls of the batter and place on top of the stew. Start in the centre and drop around it. It will look like this.

Put the slow-cooker back on High, put the lid back on and give it about half an hour and the Dumplings will be ready to serve with the stew.

Bam! 

This meal (although it took time) took very little effort at all and it is magnificent. Its hearty, its rich, it is perfect on a cold winters night and the family will love it!
It was cheap too - looking at the receipt, I can tell you that I spent $1.45 on carrots (and I only used one, so lets say 20c), $2.30 on four potatoes (I used two, so $1.15) and because I used offcuts, the meat was $4 all up. Everything else was in the pantry and I would bet your place is much the same. This would easily feed a family of 5 and the total outlay of $5.35 makes this a thrifty one! As a bloke living alone, I will be eating this for the next three days.
The ingredients for the dumplings would hardly make a dint in the stocks either, but lets guess that it was about $3 worth of ingredients. Cheap!

I hope you enjoy the recipes, let me know how you go!

COMING UP - More Cheap, Hearty Winter Fare with Pea & Ham Soup